New brushes

I've tried one of my new brushes today. Painted on a bunch of yellow and grey (decided to first paint Astronomican Grey and to then follow it up with white) using thinned paint and my initial impression is: It's a very different way of painting. The thinned paint worked far better with the Raphaël 8404 size 0 than my GW brush. It kept much more of it and it went on better, painting with the sides of the brush rather than the tip tip. But you really really have to develop a lighter touch. I could be much more raw and rough before, it's almost like I could force the paint onto the mini in the past, and now I am just gentle nudging the surface.

For those curious I use a thinning recipe ripped directly of the intertubes. It's suppose to be Jennifer Haley's. She's damn good so I thought it could be a good start at least:) And it works quite well for me right now. I drop a few drops on my palette and then put some paint next to that and mix it up as I go along. So no magic there, just messy old me :)

For the curious, this is the recipe in question:

• 25% Liquitex Slow-Dri
• 25% Winsor and Newton Flow Improver
• 50% Water

A bad bad picture (an iPhone 3G is *not* a good camera for minis!) but the paint just goes on so much nicer with it thinned properly and a good brush, and the yellow is easily the nicest in my collection already. Hopefully my remaining vehicles will end up real nice with the same way of painting. I am actually starting to wonder if I should bring out the airbrush at all as painting this way is quite quick. At least quick for *me*.

Finished test Terminator, Assault Terminators WIP, and Brushes

I tried a few different things with this test model (the last test!) and I think that I need to add an extra highlight above sunburst yellow. Thinking of bleached bone.

I also tried Gryphonne Sepia on the white. Nope, didn't really turn out that well. Looks off. Going to go for a very thin astronomicon grey on the real deal. At least I am planning to do so, never know if I will change my mind :) I do know that I am done with building up yellow for quite a while, white base is the way to go. And nicely thinned paints which I will get back to after this message:

I paint very randomly. I see something I want to paint on the model and I go for that. There's a lot of detail on these guys so it will take some time it seems. Going to go for painting all of them to the step before washes and then probably finish them one by one. I am happy with the shields which are turning out quite nice. I am also going for a kind of red tone for the gold which we will see how it will pan out. Lysander got quite a lot of gold on him so I better get some practice in :)

I now thin my paints with something else than just pure water. I found Jennifer Haley's recipe here and there on the web and copied that as a starting point. I got a fairly large empty bottle as well to mix it up in, which turned out quite meh as it is very hard to pour from. So mostly I pour some of the liquid into my palette and mix the color and thinning medium right there and then. Works quite well and it is a lot easier to paint, slowly starting to get the hang of it (I hope) and I really get while people want to start out with a white primer as thinned paints are hard to paint on top of black (for me).

In minor news, I got the Dark Eldar codex, awesome, and just a few minis because they look so awesome that I want to paint some. I ordered some real brushes (sorry GW) so I will probably give some thoughts on them when they arrive and I can try them out. I have also gotten 0(!) contributions to the painting competition. I think I need to promote it a bit more soon! So anyone wanting to enter will not have a lot of competition, at least not yet.